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Psychoanalysis and politics

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Contemporary Political Theory Aims and scope

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Notes

  1. See Luxon (2013).

  2. See Loewald (1980, p. 354).

  3. Ranjana Khanna offers a brilliant such reading in Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (2003).

  4. For a beautiful meditation on the place of Gender Trouble in one person’s queer life see Rosenberg (2014).

  5. In referencing Lacanian queer negativity, I invoke especially Edelman (2004) and Dean (2009).

  6. Wendy Grace concurs: ‘the insistence by Lacan and others on the trans-historical nature of desire … could not be more contrary to Foucault’ (Grace, 2013, p. 236). Grace continues: ‘For Foucault, power is not a drive’ (Grace, 2013, p. 239).

  7. See Foucault’s famous image in The Order of Things: ‘If [the fundamental arrangements of knowledge] were to disappear as they appeared, if some event … were to cause them to crumble, … then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (Foucault, 1970, p. 387).

  8. I want to emphasize here that Foucault was never anti-psychoanalytic. As Wendy Grace explains: ‘To describe Foucault’s relationship to psychoanalysis as radical opposition overlooks his willingness to acknowledge its progressive aspects’ (Grace, 2013, p. 230).

  9. See especially Hacking (2002).

  10. For a queer politics of touch as tact and contact see especially Caron (2014).

  11. For a book-length defense of thinking Foucault with Lacan, see Rajchman (1991). For a challenge to this view see Grace (2013).

  12. On ethics as recoil see the indispensable Scott (1990).

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Acknowledgements

I thank David Temin for editorial assistance with this article, and the participants in my Fall 2013 graduate seminar for their stubborn questions and sensitive insights around these topics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis, 55455, MN, USA

    Nancy Luxon

  2. Emory University, Atlanta, 30320, GA, USA

    Lynne Huffer

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Luxon, N., Huffer, L. Psychoanalysis and politics. Contemp Polit Theory 15, 119–138 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2014.64

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